[September 02, 2003] The NewsML standard is an initiative of The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), established in 1965 "to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the World's Press; IPTC membership is drawn from major news agencies, newspaper publishers, news distributors and vendors from around the globe." NewsML (XML for News) is a standard for news markup and management, designed as a news wrapper, in which (1) "all formats and media types are recognized equally; (2) uniform metadata may be used for all media objects; (3) development and packaging of news items is supported; (4) a recommended format for text objects is NITF [NITF is an XML standard designed to structure independent news articles]; (5) one may express the named relationships between news items and their parts; (6) alternative representations of the same part are supported; (7) attachment of metadata from standard and non-standard schemes, including the IPTC subject codes is supported." IPTC's related XML-based markup languages for specialized domains include SportsML, ProgramGuideML, and EventsML. "Both NewsML and NITF provide for use of an IPTC-managed Subject Reference System (SRS) which allows Information Providers access to a universal language independant coding system for indicating the subject content and for describing other features of news items. These include Subjects, Subject Qualifiers, Media, NewsItem type and Genre."

ProgramGuideML. This list was set up in May 2003 for discussion of ProgramGuideML (Radio/TV news). Most members would be affiliated with broadcasting stations, news agencies, news publishers, news distributors and vendors from around the globe. "

eventsml. Set up in May 2003 to support the development of IPTC's EventsML standard, and will supersede the EventML-DEV list. See IPTC Mirror Number 113 (April/May 2003) for a description of EventsML.

eventml-dev. Set up in October 2002. "Development of EventML as resulted from October 2002 Amsterdam IPTC meetings; this group is open to all IPTC members who have interest in developing a standard for event listing."

iptcmembers. This IPTC members-only list was set up in March 2001 and is used for internal discussions concerning the IPTC work programme.

controlledvocabulary. The Controlled Vocabulary group was set up in August 2003 and is "for people who wish to engage in discussions related to the use of Controlled Vocabularies, Hierarchies, Thesauri, and Classification schemes used in databases, with a specific interest in image databases."

news-summit. Set up in June 2003. The list is designed to "facilitate the organising of a News Summit, bringing together all those interested in standards for the creation, publishing and delivery of News."

The The Chinese NewsML Community "was set up by The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and funded by Innovation and Technology Commission, HKSAR. Its charter is to establish and promote a local NewsML standard and supporting tools in order to speed up the pace of e-business in Hong Kong and enhance Hong Kong's commercial competitiveness in the world. The NewsML standard, released by International Press Telecommunications Council, is designed for smoothening internal operations which leads to better quality of services and higher efficiency. Although the advantages of NewsML have been recognized internationally, the news media and publishing industry in Hong Kong has only recently started to investigate it. Thus, there is an urgency for them to exploit the potentials of NewsML and its associated technology..." See the list of publications and software offerings. [description adapted from the 'About' page]

[October 18, 2002]International Press Telecommunications Council Approves NewsML Version 1.1 Specification. A posting from David Allen announces the approval of the NewsML Version 1.1 specification by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). A revised XML DTD and XML Schema are available on the project website. The NewsML Schema Version 1.1 represents the same document structure as the NewsML DTD version 1.1; in addition it provides control over element and attribute content in accordance with the NewsML Specification. IPTC has also published an updated V1.1 NewsML Functional Specification and IPTC NewsML NewsAgency Implementation Guidelines document. NewsML is "a compact, extensible and flexible structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications. It supports the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata. It allows for the provision of multiple representations of the same information, and handles arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings. It supports all stages of the news lifecycle and allows the evolution of news items over time. Though media-independent, NewsML provides specific mechanisms for handling text. It allows the provenance of both metadata and news content to be asserted." [Full context]

[April 22, 2002] Developed under the International Press Telecommunications Council, NewsML is an XML-based "news-industry packaging and metadata standard for exchanging multi-part news and information in multiple media; it helps content providers represent and manage news throughout the news lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use... NewsML can be applied at all stages in the (electronic) news life cycle. Typical uses would include: in and between editorial systems; between news agencies and their customers; between publishers and news aggregators; and between news service providers and end users. Because it is intended for use in electronic production, delivery and archiving it does not include specific provision for traditional paper-based publishing, though formats intended for this purpose -- such as the News Industry Text Format -- can be accommodated. Similarly it is not primarily intended for use in editing or creating news content, though it may be used as a basis for systems doing this... NewsML is the structure used to publish news in any format. It can be used by news providers to combine their pictures, video, text, graphics and audio files in news output available on web sites, mobile phones, high end desktops, interactive television and any other device... Because the news is structured, devices receiving the news can select the appropriate content. For example, a Web page being viewed over a broadband link might show all media types including video while a current-generation mobile phone might receive only a text headline as an SMS message." (adapted from the website description and Reuters NewsML Showcase)

From the 2002 Functional Specification: "NewsML is a compact, extensible and flexible structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications. It supports the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata. It allows for the provision of multiple representations of the same information, and handles arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings. It supports all stages of the news lifecycle and allows the evolution of news items over time. Though media-independent, NewsML provides specific mechanisms for handling text. It allows the provenance of both metadata and news content to be asserted... NewsML is primarily intended as a format for the interchange of news. However, it may also be used as a format for news storage and as a support for the creation, editing, management and publication of news in a networked computing environment. A NewsML document is an XML document, which must be valid with respect to the NewsML Document Type Definition (DTD) that appears in Appendix 1 of this specification. Like all XML documents, NewsML documents are logical rather than physical objects. They may be built up of the contents of multiple physical files through the use of entity references as described in the XML specification, or by the use of pointers within the NewsML document...NewsML makes no assumption about the media type, format or encoding of news objects. NewsML documents can contain text, video, audio, graphics, photos, or other media and combinations of media yet to be invented..."

[November 15, 1999] Earlier description: International Press Telecommunications Council Announces Work Programme for End-to-End XML News Interchange. IPTC has recently issued an announcement that "major news industry organisations are pooling their resources under the auspices of the IPTC [International Press Telecommunications Council] to develop a single XML-based standard for all aspects of news creation, storage and delivery. At their recent meeting in Amsterdam, members of the IPTC agreed to revamp their operating structure and establish a new work programme, IPTC2000, which will deliver an XML-based standard to represent and manage news through its life-cycle, including production, interchange and consumer use. Entitled NewsML, it is intended that the new framework standard will build on the intellectual property invested in existing IPTC standards such as the Information Interchange Model (IIM), News Industry Text Format (NITF) and the IPTC's widely used Subject Classification Standard. Using Extensible Markup Language (XML), it is intended that NewsML will draw appropriately on existing and emerging W3C recommendations. Three working groups have been established to develop the key components of the programme. These are News Structure and Management, News Text and News Metadata. Earlier this year, the IPTC announced the publication of its first XML based standard, News Industry Text Format (NITF). This work, together with the Information Interchange Model (IIM), will form the basis of NewsML." NewsML is described as "an XML encoding for news which is intended to be used for the creation, transfer and delivery of news. NewsML is media independent, and allows equally for the representation of the evening TV news and a simple textual story. Specifically, NewsML provides the following features: (1) All formats and media types recognised equally; (2) Facilitates the development of news items; (3) Collections of news items; (4) Named relationships between newsitems; (5) Structure consisting of parts and named relationships between parts; (6) Alternative representations of the same part; (7) Explicit inclusion, inclusion by reference and exclusion of parts and alternatives; (8) Attachment of metadata from standard and non-standard schemes."

There is a public discussion forum for NewsML, and [for] representation of news in XML. This list is open both to IPTC members and non-members. To join it, send mail to newsml-subscribe@egroups.com. The list archive (at http://www.egroups.com/group/newsml/) is open to the public. Those who have joined the list may contribute and can view list membership. See NewsML.

[March 17, 2000] Jo Rabin (Reuters) has posted an announcement for the publication of updated NewsML specifications, following on an IPTC Standards Committee meeting in Washington, 2000-01-28. NewsML is being proposed as "a[n XML-based] media independent structural framework for representation of news... NewsML is media independent, and allows equally for the representation of the evening TV news and a simple textual story. Specifically, NewsML provides the following features: All formats and media types recognised equally; Facilitates the development of news items; Collections of news items; Named relationships between newsitems; Structure consisting of parts and named relationships between parts; Alternative representations of the same part; Explicit inclusion, inclusion by reference and exclusion of parts and alternatives; Attachment of metadata from standard and non-standard schemes." In the announcement, Jo Rabin writes: "Two updated documents are now available following discussion at the Washington NewsML meeting. A revised version of the NewsML Requirements document is available at http://www.iptc.org/xn-2.htm. There is also an RTF version of this document which contains change bars showing the difference from the previous version, and this can be found at http://www.iptc.org/xn-2.rtf. A revised version of the NewsML Encoding Decsisions document is available at http://www.iptc.org/xn-8.htm. There is an RTF version of this document too, showing change bars, and this can be found at http://www.iptc.org/xn-8.rtf." According to the NewsML Requirements [NSM0002 (XN-2) - 5th IPTC Draft, 16-March-2000], NewsML will: (1) support the representation of electronic news entities i.e. news-items, parts of news-items, collections of news-items, relationships between news-items and metadata associated with news-items; (2) be usable throughout the news lifecycle; (3) allow news-items to consist of arbitrary mixtures of media types, languages and encodings; (4) be usable either as a replacement for or allow the transport of all existing news formats and encodings; (5) support a number of different constructions of the same data; (6) support the management and development of news-items over time; (7) be simply extensible and flexible; (8) allow for authentication and signature of metadata and news-item content; (9) not be unduly verbose; (10) use XML and other appropriate standards and recommendations; (11) provide a lightweight facility for the representation of text." These requirements are elaborated fully in the text of the NewsML Requirements document. Whereas the NewsML Requirements Specification describes what NewsML does, the NewsML Encoding Decisions document [NSM0003 - 3rd IPTC Draft, 16-March-2000] discusses some further requirements which "specify or place limitations on how NewsML is to do this. Specifically: (1) how XML is to be used to construct NewsML, (2) the factors that must be borne in mind when to adopt further XML related standards, (3) the means of formal definition of NewsML, and (4) which XML related standards could be used to support the initial draft of NewsML."

General: News, Articles, Papers

[December 09, 2003] "IPTC Joins in XML News Standards Summit. IPTC Roadmap 2005 for NewsML, NITF and SportsML." - "XML-based formats for sharing news are rapidly gaining acceptance and may soon revolutionise the way news is shared between agencies and is presented to the public, a software developer's group was told today. But traditional newspaper publishers are still moving cautiously. 'Customers prefer extremely simple solutions,' said Geoff Haynes, manager of product development for The Associated Press. More than 100 news organisations, news system vendors and XML developers gathered here for The News Standards Summit, an all-day session where progress reports were delivered by developers and users who share XML as their lingua franca. As a major force in news standards for nearly 40 years, IPTC presented its latest versions of NewsML, NITF and SportsML -- standards that are already in use by major news agencies around the world. 'The wide interest and participation in the News Summit proves that there is an industry-wide need to develop the business cases for the required for management support and implement the existing standards for news,' said John Iobst, chairman of the IPTC. With several text-based systems for tagging news content and important data about the news, IPTC is provides a framework for moving news stories from creation through editing and onward to publishing. For magazines and web discussion 'blogs', several XML standards group presented plans for publishing and syndication. The IPTC described its own plans -- called IPTC Roadmap 2005 -- to update NewsML and revamp the method for proposing, designing and maintaining its XML standards. 'The IPTC Roadmap 2005 has as its primary goals to make standards easier to implement and to improve documentation and education on standards. This is driven by requirements from our users, and shows that IPTC is already aligning with wide user demand,' said Michael Steidl, IPTC's Managing director. 'This makes us work harder on these aims.' The News Standards Summit was held in partnership with the XML 2003 Conference of IDEAlliance and OASIS. The IPTC's next regular meeting will be in Athens in March 2004. The IPTC, based in Windsor, England, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards that are used by virtually every major news organisation in the world..."

[October 15, 2003] "IPTC Approves New Versions of its NITF and NewsML Standards." - "Maintenance releases of two popular standards for sharing news have been unanimously approved at the autumn meeting of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) here. News industry representatives also approved further work on a next-generation version of NewsML that will further streamline the sharing of multimedia news files among agencies and news consumers. Upgrades to the world's most widely used XML news markup formats -- News Industry Text Format 3.2 and NewsML version 1.2 -- are part of an ongoing maintenance programme that is designed to keep both standards near the state of the art in XML. Broader development of the proposed NewsML version 2 continued, with members hearing that NewsML 2 will be compatible with previous versions. Preliminary NewsML 2 specifications are expected to be released next year. Meanwhile, NewsML users in China, Hong Kong and Macau announced plans for a regional meeting; details will be posted on the IPTC's web site. ProgramGuideML 1.0, an initiative by Japanese members for sharing television and radio programming information, gained preliminary approval. A final vote is scheduled for March 2003. The new standard will allow channel, program and time details to be sent from broadcasters to news outlets, cable system operators and web sites in a common computer-readable format. A uniform method of describing the content of photographs was also passed. The list of terms, which is expandable, can be used alone or in conjunction with any of the IPTC's XML formats. The descriptive terms are expressed as numbers, making multilingual applications easy to design. Work continues toward the News Standards Summit prior to XML Conference 2003 in Philadelphia on 8 December, 2003. The IPTC and other XML interest groups will join software designers, news system managers and system vendors in a comprehensive review of XML in the news industry. The day-long News Standards Summit will be held in conjunction with XML Conference 2003, a major trade show and education forum for the XML industry..."

[October 13, 2003]XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence. A News Standards Summit sponsored by IDEAlliance, IFRA, IPTC, NAA, and OASIS will be held December 8, 2003, in conjunction with the Philadelphia XML 2003 Conference. The organizers are concerned that key specifications for news content representation and dissemination (NewsML, NITF, PRISM, RSS, Atom, ICE, XMP, XHTML, etc.) are being developed in isolation. The News Standards Summit "will bring together major players -- experts on news metadata standards as well as commercial news providers, users, and aggregators. News Summit attendees will analyze the current state and future expectations for news and publishing XML efforts from both the content and processing model perspectives. The goal is to increase understanding and drive practical, productive convergence. All interested parties are welcome to participate. Anyone who develops or implements news exchange standards is strongly encouraged to attend, particularly providers and users of news, online content, mobile communications, newspapers and magazines, and picture libraries. The program will feature presentations from several key news standards efforts, balanced by a requirements overview from a panel of international users." Confirmed speakers include Chet Ensign (LexisNexis), Laurent Le Meur (AFP), Alan Karben (XML Team Solutions), Ron Daniel (Taxonomy Strategies), Dianne Kennedy (IDEAlliance), Sam Ruby (IBM), Ben Hammersley (author of Content Syndication with RSS), John Cowan (Reuters), Peter Meirs (Time Inc), and Patricia Harris (NISO). They will be joined by speakers from Adobe, Associated Press, Dow Jones and Nokia; other well-known participants include Tim Bray, David Megginson, and Mark Walters.

[September 20, 2003] "NewsML for Dummies. ntroduction to the NewsML Structure." From AFP. September 20, 2003 or later. "This document is an introduction to the NewsML structure, and its use by AFP ; it is intended to help XML developers understand the logic of NewsML, under its apparent complexity. It doesn't preclude the study of the NewsML functional specifications (www.newsml.org). AFP now distributes its multimedia services in the NewsML format. This document describes the AFP implementation of NewsML, and constitutes a guideline for developers of news systems receiving those AFP services. NewsML is a media independent standard for describing news in an electronic service environment. NewsML defines an XML based language for expressing the structure of news, associated metadata, and relationships between news, throughout their lifecycle. NewsML introduces several types of objects, each of them representing a level of news information; from the lower level to the upper, they are : (1) content item (ContentItem) used to wrap information content, (2) news component (NewsComponent) used to structure and describe news information, (3) news item (NewsItem) used to identify news information. (4) news document (NewsML) used to transport news information, (5) news package (e.g., MIME multipart-related envelope) used to package news data. NewsItems, NewsComponents and ContentItems are generically referred as news objects... NewsML focus is on structure: it does not represent layout or other presentational features. Such features can be represented using stylesheets, or other presentation languages based on XML technology such as XHTML or SMIL. The needs to express complex structures are a requirement of NewsML, but NewsML representation is kept as simple as possible for news content commonly used. Developed in news community, NewsML must not become a new all-purpose schema language, or abstract description framework like RDF or XML-Data. Thus NewsML definitions are directly understandable by people from the news environment. NewsML provides support for all media-types in use today. Knowing the rapid pace of development in IT fields and news environment, NewsML must be easily extensible. This extensibility is achieved by the definition of generic tags, and by the standard means developed by the XML community, especially the namespace mechanism..."

[July 21, 2003] "Content-Centric XML: Coming Soon to an Intranet Near You?" By Robert J. Boeri. In EContent Magazine (July 20, 2003). "Content-centric XML hasn't followed its original five-year script. Celebrating its fifth birthday as a standard last February, XML was supposed to supplant HTML, shift the burden of processing Web sites from servers to underutilized client PCs, and achieve the holy grail of 'create once, reuse many times.' Although use of XML to transfer information between applications was one of the World Wide Web Consortium's original goals, emphasis was on content-centric XML: Web pages and documents. What happened...? Although XML originally emphasized text content, multimedia use is also increasing, especially on intranets. And now here's the XML-intranet connection. Intranets often provide employees with external newsfeeds. It's easy linking to these feeds, if you're satisfied with employees jumping outside the firewall or viewing them in a pop-up window. If that's all you want, then basic HTML (or XHTML) works fine. But if you'd like to store that news locally, index and search it, or contribute new content expressed in XML, consider NewsML. 'News Markup Language' is an XML schema conceived by Reuters, developed and ratified by the International Press Telecommunications Council, and increasingly a standard for composing and delivering news. NewsML provides a way to produce news and maintain its metadata, and it supports text and rich media. Intranets can use automated processes to deliver NewsML content to a wide variety of devices such as financial service desktops, Web sites, and mobile phones. Journalists can write news stories using standard XML authoring tools in several languages... Although NewsML isn't a one-size-fits-all model (no model is), its adoption is growing both by news organizations creating syndicated content as well as intranets delivering that content. NewsML works its magic with a carefully conceived schema that packages news items, regardless of language or media type, with robust metadata. News 'envelopes' contain one or more news items, which in turn contain one or more components in one or more written or spoken languages. Envelopes describe items with attributes like date and time sent, news service, and priority. Text, images, video, and sound can be packaged in an item as hyperlinks. And Gregor Geiermann, a consultant with NetFederation Interactive Media, actually uses NewsML and has success stories to tell.."

[June 17, 2003] "Work on Radio and TV Listing Markup Language Started." - "A new way for broadcasters, newspapers and web sites to exchange TV listings has been begun the formal approval process that will end with adoption as a new worldwide standard. At its annual meeting, the International Press Telecommunications Council voted to move ahead with review and approval of ProgramGuideML, a powerful but simple way to show program and channel information in any language. Designed by a group of Japanese newspapers and broadcasters, ProgramGuideML uses XML technology to mark up important programming information with simple text tags that allow easy files exchange between news agencies and automatic processing. If approved by the IPTC at its spring 2004 meeting in Athens, ProgramGuideML will join a list of standards that are used by news agencies around the world. IPTC members also studied proposals to redesign the group's web site, where standards and documentation are made available at no cost. The redesign will include interactive aids to help programmers and news executives understand the features of the standards... The IPTC's next regular meeting will be in Leipzig, Germany, in October 2003. The IPTC, based in Windsor, UK, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards that are used by virtually every major news organization in the world..." See also: (1) NewsML and IPTC; (2) News Industry Text Format (NITF); (3) "IPTC Develops RadioTV-NewsML Standard for Radio/TV Program Information"; (4) SportsML.

[October 01, 2002] "URN Namespace for NewsML Resources." By David Allen (IPTC). IETF Network Working Group, Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-allen-newsml-urn-rfc3085bis-00.txt'. September 24, 2002; expies February 25, 2003. This document describes a URN (Uniform Resource Name) namespace for identifying NewsML NewsItems and NewsML related XML Schemas. A NewsItem is an information resource that is expressible as a NewsML element within a NewsML document conforming to the NewsML Document Type Declaration (DTD) as defined by the International Press Tele- communications Council (IPTC)... NewsML is an XML format for packaging multimedia news resources. It has been created under the auspices of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), and version 1.0 was approved by the IPTC on 6 October 2000. The same logical NewsItem may exist in multiple physical locations. The NewsML specification allows NewsItems to have multiple URLs, but only a single URN. It is the latter which then uniquely names the resource. This document obsoletes RFC 3085... This namespace specification is for a formal namespace. Reasons for Issue of New RFC: RFC 3085 issued in March 2001 specified the URN to be used when identifying individual NewsML NewsItems. Since that time the use of XML Schemas has become more common and it is now necessary to provide a modified form of the original newsml URN to enable individual Schemas to be properly identified. This new RFC seeks to address this issue by (1) Introducing a new alternative form of the newsml URN definition; (2) Updating the original definition to meet the new RFC template recently issued by the IETF (RFC YYYY)..."

[April 24, 2002] Chinese NewsML. Posting from Jussie Chan for the Chinese NewsML Community. "The Chinese University of Hong Kong has set up a Chinese NewsML Community to help promoting the adoption of NewsML and the associated XML-based technologies among the news and media industry in Greater China Region. Recently, we have developed some application prototypes and supporting tools, for processing Chinese NewsML documents in particular. Although the IPTC Subject Code has been translated into many different languages, no official Chinese translation is available so far..."

[April 17, 2002]IPTC Develops RadioTV-NewsML Standard for Radio/TV Program Information. The IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) has launched the RadioTV-NewsML project "as part of a larger effort to track and create specialized vocabularies for data of interest to the news industry." Draft XML DTDs are available from the project website. RadioTV-NewsML "consists of five NewsML types: (1) ProgramTable-NewsML gives groups of programs (program table) for each station in newspaper; (2) ProgramCommentary-NewsML gives commentary for programs; (3) ProgramPicture-NewsML supports pictures used in commentary; (4) BroadcastNews-NewsML gives news related to broadcasting programs; (5) Program-NewsML gives information per program for the Internet. RadioTV-NewsML aims to be the global XML standard for the interchange of Radio/TV Program Information by NewsML. Designed to be as easy to understand and implement as possible, RadioTV-NewsML allows all for the exchange of Radio/TV information for news publishers and broadcast stations." The project includes a RadioTV-NewsML Users Forum which connects publishers who use RadioTV-NewsML and vendors who create tools that process RadioTV-NewsML documents. NewsML is an XML-based standard to represent and manage news throughout its lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use." [Full context]

[April 22, 2002]NewsML Toolkit Version 2.0 Includes New Read/Write Interface and User Manual. A communiqué from David Megginson announces the release of a version 2.0 NewsML Toolkit which provides a read/write interface to NewsML. Developed under the International Press Telecommunications Council, NewsML is an XML-based "news-industry packaging and metadata standard for exchanging multi-part news and information in multiple media; it helps content providers represent and manage news throughout the news lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use." The NewsML Toolkit is an open-source Java library for reading and processing NewsML documents. Version 2.0 of the NewsML Toolkit has been developed through sponsorship provided by Reuters PLC; it is released under the Gnu Lesser General Public License (LGPL), so this free NewsML source code library may be redistributed and modified. While version 1.1 of the NewsML Toolkit was mostly a read-only interface, version 2.0 provides "the ability to create and modify NewsML documents programatically; it includes support for creating new nodes and modifying existing ones. Client applications can now use the toolkit to perform simple or complex modifications on a NewsML package before saving it back to XML, or even to create a new NewsML package entirely from scratch. Version 2.0 is backwards-compatible with v1.1, so it won't break existing applications. The new release also provides a detailed manual designed for programmers using the NewsML Toolkit in their own programs." [Full context]

[December 20, 2001]Reuters' NewsML Toolkit Provides Enhanced Functionality and Conformance Testing. Postings from Irving Levine (Reuters) and David Megginson announce the final release of the open-source Java-based NewsML Toolkit version 1.1 and public availability of the software. This release reflects a second major phase of development adding functionality of the NewsML toolkit. "NewsML 1.0 is a news-industry packaging and metadata standard for exchanging multi-part news and information in multiple media. The NewsML Toolkit is a Java library for processing packages of news syndicated using the IPTC NewsML standard and for testing conformance. Developed by Dave Compton (Reuters Corporates/Media Group) and David Megginson, the NewsML toolkit is meant to be used both by subscribers of NewsML and by NewsML developers to simplify the processing of NewsML documents. The latest toolkit functionality allows the user to perform detailed searches of documents, using Java, in order to target specific content, without having to incur the overhead of directly examining every piece of data. In addition, the user can remove unwanted portions of a document and verify the resultant content is still valid, according to the NewsML standard." [Full context]

[November 28, 2001]New Release of Open Source NewsML Toolkit. A posting from David Megginson announces the release of a NewsML Toolkit version 1.1 beta. The new version constitutes "an extensive rewrite of the version 1.0 NewsML Toolkit released in May 2001. NewsML is a news industry standard for packaging and metadata of news objects in multiple media. The NewsML Toolkit is an open-source Java library for reading and processing NewsML documents. The version 1.1 beta includes: (1) full XPath support, (2) high-level support for formal names and basis-for-choice selection, and (3) an extensible conformance test library. Over 300 unit tests are now included. The NewsML Toolkit is Open Source (LGPL), and may be used in free or commercial software products, following the provisions of the license. Work on version 1.1 of the NewsML Toolkit has been sponsored by Reuters PLC." [Full context]

[October 02, 2001] "NewsML -- Enabling a Standards-Led Revolution in News Publishing." By Tony Allday (Reuters Media Group). In EBU Technical Review Number 287 (June 2001). ISSN: 1609-1469, from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Geneva, Switzerland. Special Issue: 'XML Technologies in Broadcasting.' 8 pages. "NewsML has been developed and ratified as an open standard by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), for the structuring of multimedia news. This article provides an introduction to NewsML, which is a derivative of the rapidly-spreading XML standard.... NewsML is an XML language for the news industry. It is intended, as the IPTC says, to represent and manage news throughout its lifecycle. It is designed to provide a media-independent structural framework for news, so that publishers can work quickly and efficiently in the new digital environment, to the benefit of those who consume their content. Crucially, NewsML is an open standard, which means it can be easily adopted and used by any publisher... NewsML simply takes the form of an XML document which has a series of components -- or elements -- that are used to structure and process the actual news content. For example, consider the way in which a single piece of news content -- such as a text story, a digital image, or an audio or video clip -- would be handled. NewsML is media-neutral, so no assumptions are made about the media type, format or encoding of the data. The news content itself is carried as a data element within a ContentItem. If encoded, this may have an Encoding element, and an optional Characteristics element that can specify the requirements for the system which is to carry the data; for example, the file size. The ContentItem may also contain a wide range of metadata elements, a few examples of which are media type, format and notation. At the next level up, the ContentItem is carried by a NewsComponent. This exists mainly to provide a way of establishing relationships between multiple items of news content. The NewsComponent enables, for example, the specification of whether two pictures are equivalent (i.e., the same image at different resolutions) and whether the picture is a complement to a news story. At the next layer, the NewsItem is the central component of NewsML. It is a standalone, manageable, piece of news that must have both Identification and NewsManagement elements and which contains a single NewsComponent. At the top level, the NewsML element contains one or more NewsItems and a NewsEnvelope. The latter contains workflow-related data such as the date and time of issue, sender, recipient, and priority information: the NewsEnvelope can even specify whether the contents of a transmission form part of a particular product..." [cache]

[October 02, 2001] "NewsML for Dummies." By Laurent Le Meur (Direction Technique - Direction Développement Multimédia AFP). September 30, 2001. Draft version 2. 19 pages. "This document is an introduction to the NewsML structure, and its use by AFP. It is intended to help XML developers understand the logic of NewsML, under its apparent complexity. It doesn't preclude the study of the NewsML functional specifications. AFP now distributes its multimedia services in the NewsML format. This document describes the AFP implementation of NewsML, and constitutes a guideline for developers of news systems receiving those AFP services... NewsML is a media independent standard for describing news in an electronic service environment. NewsML defines an XML based language for expressing the structure of news , associated metadata, and relationships between news, throughout their lifecycle. NewsML introduces several types of objects, each of them representing a level of news information. From the lower level to the upper, they are: (1) content item (ContentItem) used to wrap information content, (2) news component (NewsComponent) used to structure and describe news information, (3) news item (NewsItem) used to identify news information, (4) news document (NewsML) used to transport news information, (5) news package [e.g., MIME multipart-related envelope] used to package news data. NewsItems, NewsComponents and ContentItems are generically referred as news objects. The granularity of those objects has been chosen to get clear and non overlapping functions in the architecture..."

[August 22, 2001] "NewsML - User Guideline for News Agencies." [Compiled by] David Allen, Managing Director of International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). ['The NewsAgency Implementation Guideline 2001-08 covers various aspects of implementation that have been raised by users. The guideline is marked DRAFT as it has yet to be formally approved by IPTC members.'] "NewsML is an extensible management format for news information of all types. It consists of a single XML Document Type Definition (DTD) but allows a number of different types of document instances to be valid against the DTD. The document types are NewsML with contained NewsItem and NewsComponents, TopicSets and Catalogs. A Catalog is used by a provider to give information to users on how to locate the various parts of NewsML that are used in the providers services. The TopicSets provide data in controlled vocabularies to populate those parts of NewsML where vocabulary information is required, in particular DescriptiveMetadata. This Guideline provides advice on good practices for News Agencies using NewsML in their services. NewsML is intended to be used widely for news and has to exist in a standard form to allow providers and recipients to process the information in a consistent manner. NewsML has been Trademarked by IPTC and the published DTD must be used to validate all instances claiming to be NewsML..." Document also available in HTML format. [cache]

July 05, 2001] "NetFederation Officially Starts NewsML Showcase." - "Cologne, Germany. 03-July-2001. The German-based NetFederation Interactive Media GmbH has published a NewsML showcase today. The NetFederation showcase contains information on the XML flavour NewsML for business users and developers. The aim of this showcase is to become a portal for NewsML knowledge and a discussion forum for business usage. You can access this showcase directly via www.net-federation.de/newsml. NetFederation is a leading company in NewsML technology in Germany. The company is currently developing a prototype NewsML-specification for the Corporate Communication department of the international pharmaceutical company Aventis (France). NetFederation's prototype for Aventis aims to standardize all of the company's internal and external communication flows. The project intends to facilitate the information exchange and workflow of all Aventis communicators and internal communication portals. Furthermore, the prototype can enable Aventis communicators to export company news directly to external news-databases (e.g. of news agencies, online health-care portals). This project is called 'ACM - Aventis Content Marketplace' and is one of the first prototypes worldwide to standardize information exchange between internal and external company communication systems by making use of XML technology standards."

[June 26, 2001]Reuters Releases Updated Version of the NewsML Toolkit. Reuters has announced an updated release of the NewsML Toolkit Version 1.0. "The NewsML Toolkit is an open-source Java library for reading and processing NewsML documents. NewsML 1.0 is a news-industry packaging and metadata standard for exchanging multi-part news and information in multiple media. This latest version of the Java based toolkit follows the alpha testing version released in December 2000. Developed in conjunction with XML specialists, Megginson Technologies Ltd., it is designed to simplify the processing of NewsML documents for subscribers to NewsML Services. NewsML Toolkit v1.0 now offers increased functionality including: (1) Access to all elements and attributes in a NewsML document via a Java Application Programming Interface; (2) Complete metadata extraction; (3) The ability to locate vocabularies which source content values for elements in a NewsML document; (4) Complete JavaDoc documentation. The NewsML Toolkit is available for use under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Reuters is also developing two complementary toolkits that build on NewsML Toolkit v1.0's document content extraction. These tools include: (1) A conformance checking tool, which will verify a NewsML document beyond visual basic DTD validation; (2) An application level toolkit, which will provide an intuitive level of parsing of a NewsML document. This allows the user to pose queries from a news perspective and 'prune' NewsItems in order to keep only selected content." [Full context]

[March 26, 2001]COMTEX News Network Adopts NewsML Standard. COMTEX News Network, Inc. recently announced support for the XML-based NewsML standard, which supports multimedia news creation, storage and delivery. "NewsML can be used by news providers to combine their pictures, video, text, graphics and audio files in news output for multiple display platforms or devices, including Web sites, mobile phones, high end desktops, and interactive television. The technology also enables news to be transmitted in several different languages. The common infrastructure allows news providers to combine their content from various sources with little effort, helping publishers create information packages targeted to specific audiences, improving delivery of personalized news to the end-user. Individual searches and filter systems will be able to process information from a wider range of sources, as information from multiple publishers will be in a single format. In addition to creating a single format, NewsML offers an accurate, objective set of descriptive tools that make searching more precise. COMTEX News Network, Inc. is a full service, business-to-business infomediary, aggregates and redistributes diverse, real-time global news and information to resellers in the Internet, Wall Street and corporate markets; COMTEX gathers nearly 20,000 stories a day from over 10,000 diverse, global sources." [Full context]

[June 18, 2001] "NetFederation adapts NewsML-Specification for use by Aventis Corporate Communications." - "Cologne-based NetFederation Interactive Media GmbH is adapting NewsML for the Corporate Communications department of international pharmaceutical company Aventis. NetFederation4s development aims to standardize all internal and external communication exchange and workflow of all Aventis communicators and internal communication portals. Furthermore the system will enable the Aventis communicators to export company news directly to external news-databases (e.g., of news agencies, online health-care portals). This project -- called 'ACM -- Aventis Content Marketplace' -- is one of the first attempts worldwide to standardize information exchange between internal and external company communication systems by making use of XML technology standards." [Announcement: Cologne, May 21, 2001. Contact: Carsten Rossi.]

[February 15, 2001] NewsML vs. NITF. ['I am trying to understand the major differences between a news item (preferably an article) marked up in NewsML and NITF...] "NITF is a format for marking news stories. NewsML is basically a method for packaging and relating diverse kinds of media content. NITF document instances would be found within a NewsML document instance along with other content such as photos, graphics, etc." john w. iobst, ph.d., NAA vice president / newspaper operations and research [corr MW]

[October 11, 2000] Support documents for the member-approved NewsML Version 1.0 DTD. "Some more files are now available in the sub directories under iptc.org/NewsML. At this directory is (1) a file IPTCMasterCatalog.xml that provides information on the TopicSets located in the /topicset subdirectory. I have also included (2) a stylesheet for those of you with IE5 this will allow the hyperlinks in the IPTCMasterCatalog to be resolved for the TopicSets. The starter link is therefore http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/IPTCMasterCatalog.xml. For those who would like all the files in a zip package this is at http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/NewsMLv1T.zip. I hope to post more information, including the update Functional Specification very soon." From David Allen (Wed, 11 Oct 2000). [cache]

[October 26, 2000] NewsML Version 1.0 Functional Specification. International Press Telecommunications Council. 24-October-2000. 61 pages. David Allen wrote: "The version 1.0 Functional Specification is now available as a PDF document. I hope to be able to add more examples to the web site very soon. The DTD has also had its comments updated to bring both the dtd and the specification fully in line. The DTD has not changed from the any other point of view. It is expected that we will also update the TopicSets to reflect a correction in the Scheme attribute values. All these changes will be reflected in new NewsItem versions to be posted shortly." From the new Functional Specification: "NewsML is a compact, extensible and flexible structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications. It supports the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata. It allows for the provision of multiple representations of the same information, and handles arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings. It supports all stages of the news lifecycle and allows the evolution of news items over time. Though media-independent, NewsML provides specific mechanisms for handling text. It allows the provenance of both metadata and news content to be asserted. . . This Specification describes and amplifies the NewsML version 1.0 Document Type Definition. The NewsML Requirements document set out the capabilities that NewsML is required to deliver. The current specification describes the technical means that have been employed to meet those requirements. The requirements can be briefly summarised as follows: NewsML is to be a compact, extensible and flexible structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications . It must support the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata. It must allow for the provision of multiple representations of the same information, and handle arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings. It must support all stages of the news lifecycle and allow the evolution of news items over time. Though media-independent, NewsML will provide specific mechanisms for handling text. It will allow for the authentication and signature of both metadata and news content."

[February 22, 2001] "NewsML Lays Groundwork for Next-Generation News Systems. [Report from the Edge.]" By Aimee Beck and Luke Cavanagh. In The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing Volume 5, Number 6 (February 2001), pages 15-18. ['NewsML Sets Stage For Future News Systems. Passed by the IPTC in October, NewsML -- the XML-based header for multipart, multimedia news feeds -- is a dramatic step forward from the wire service standards that have been in place for decades. We outline the new standard (and its text counterpart, NITF), find out how users are gearing up to support them and gauge vendor readiness.'] "Last fall, wire services and other leading news publishers approved NewsML, an XML-based standard for transmitting news. Featuring generic markup in both header and text content and support for multimedia news feeds, NewsML paves the way for new generations of editorial systems, ones designed for digital media. Major players in the news wire industry spent more than eight years developing the News Industry Text Format (NITF), a successor to the venerable ANPA wire-story format. Originally developed in SGML and then reshaped as XML about 18 months ago, NITF was on its way to being adopted when Reuters took the idea a step further and conceived NewsML. NewsML completed a short trip through the standards gauntlet and was ratified by the IPTC this past October. With the consensus-demanding standardization process finally over, it's time to assess the implications of NewsML: Who will it affect, and how soon? What benefits will it bring? What vendors will support it? What influence will the spec have outside of the news industry? With these questions in mind, we set out to see if NewsML was gaining any traction in the field. Aside from early adopters, most notably Reuters, we found few examples of NewsML projects underway. However, change is afoot. Awareness of and demand for XML is rising rapidly in the news industry, and vendors are responding. The transition to an XML-enabled editorial environment will take years to permeate the entire global news industry, but we believe its impact ultimately will be akin to the change that the AP Leafdesk brought to U.S. newspapers in the early 1990s. Once papers had a digital wire-photo receiver, electronic pagination suddenly changed from pipedream to obtainable goal. In the same way, once papers get their hands on a system that can process XML-encoded multimedia feeds, they'll be a giant step closer to delivering well-coded files to their webmasters and in a much better position to deliver their own multimedia news coverage to consumers... [Conclusion:] The utility of XML, both in the header and the text itself, has become apparent, not only to newspapers but to a wide array of Web publishers and media companies handling news. Reuters has seeded the market with an open-source toolkit to encourage its customers to adopt NewsML, but, for NewsML to take off, the rest of the newswires and system vendors will have to support it as well. The time is right for that to happen. The blessing of NewsML by the IPTC sets a global standard for how news will be delivered in the future. With an approved spec in hand, vendors have the blueprint they need to begin implementations. Few Web content-management systems currently feature built-in support for wire services, but adding such support would mesh with their need to support XML text and variable metadata. Newspaper editorial system suppliers that have been dragging their heels on the XML issue must now catch up, or risk losing out to those that anticipated this change."

[December 05, 2000] Open Source NewsML Toolkit for Processing NewsML Packages. A communiqué from David Megginson reports on the release of a news toolkit, announced on 2000-12-05 by Reuters and Wavo at the XML 2000 Conference. "Reuters and Wavo will announce version 0.1alpha of the NewsML Toolkit, an Open Source (LGPL) Java2-based library for processing NewsML packages. The library is available at www.xmlnews.org/NewsML/toolkit/ and at the Reuters web site. NewsML is the new XML-based packaging and metadata format for news distribution, approved this fall by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). The IPTC's membership includes many of the world's major news providers, such as Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France Presse, as well as many other companies working in the news industry. For more information see www.iptc.org. The NewsML Toolkit was written for Reuters and Wavo by David Megginson of Megginson Technologies. The library is a joint project of Reuters PLC, a leading international information services provider, and Wavo, a leading news amalgamator. The NewsML Toolkit works with the Document Object Model (DOM) interface developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)."

[December 05, 2000] "Reuters and WAVO Team Up to Launch Industry Tool for NewsML." - "Reuters, the global information, news and technology group, and leading news software developer WAVO, have joined forces to launch the NewsML Toolkit, a simple interface that facilitates the implementation of the newly ratified NewsML standard. Developed by Reuters and WAVO with the assistance of XML expert David Megginson, the NewsML Toolkit offers developers with no prior XML knowledge, a fast and simple way to analyse and filter multimedia NewsML items using regular Java. The NewsML Toolkit is being released as Open Source software under version 2.1 of the 'GNU Lesser General Public License' and can be incorporated into commercial software packages royalty free, so long as any modification or improvements are released back to the public. NewsML is the new industry standard for delivering multi-media news. Reuters conceived the idea for NewsML in 1999 and donated it to the news industry for further development. The International Press and Telecommunications Council ratified NewsML in October 2000. NewsML provides a common framework to publish news in any format. It can be used by news providers to combine their pictures, video, text, graphics and audio files into news output available on web sites, mobile phones, high end desktops, interactive television and any other device... The NewsML Toolkit can be downloaded from the Reuters website at about.reuters.com/researchandstandards/firstcontact/newsmltoolkit and at www.xmlnews.org/NewsML/toolkit/..." See "NewsML and IPTC."

[October 08, 2000] NewsML Document Type Definition Version 1.0 6 October 2000. David Allen of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) announced the approval of the NewsML version 1.0 DTD for public release. Prose documentation is supplied in the DTD file in XML comments. Additional material will become available shortly and will be posted to the web site. Note also the posting of Daniel Rivers-Moore, who comments on the specification's "Confidence and Importance ratings" and on NewsML's "syntactic constructs of TopicSet, Topic, TopicSetRef, FormalName, Scheme, Property, Value, ValueRef, TopicOccurrence, TopicUse (among others), which are intended to map readily to constructs with similar names in the Topic Maps specification." [cache]

[October 11, 2000] Reuters Presents NewsML Showcase. Reuters, "the global information, news and technology group, is unveiling a showcase on www.about.reuters.com to demonstrate how its news delivery will be revolutionized by NewsML, the new industry standard for delivering news. NewsML, conceived by Reuters, was ratified by the IPTC on 6-October-2000. NewsML is a new Internet standard for the packaging of news. It provides the structure for the publication of multimedia content in XML. It is expected to become the lingua franca of news. Reuters have produced a showcase demonstrating the power of NewsML. NewsML is the structure used to publish news in any format. It can be used by news providers to combine their pictures, video, text, graphics and audio files in news output available on web sites, mobile phones, high end desktops, interactive television and any other device." The showcase describes the "values and benefits of this open standard news format. It provides a demonstration of how multimedia content can be pulled together. Advantages including multiple languages can be seamlessly provided for. The technical details and specifications are also available, along with the latest press details." According to a related Reuters announcement: "NewsML, based on the World Wide Web Council's (W3C) Extensible Markup Language (XML), provides a new standard framework to describe, package, store and deliver multimedia news. The technology is dedicated to the description of news in a standard structure, to facilitate the processing of news by computers. In April, Reuters launched a delivery mechanism for its media news products called Reuters Internet Delivery System (IDS). IDS enables Reuters to deliver its news content in XML. IDS utilizes a Reuters prototype NewsML DTD (Document Type Definition). Text news as well as photos and video files can be delivered either as independent media streams or as linked multimedia news packages. IDS is currently being used as the principal delivery mechanism for Reuters growing range of Online Report services. . . NewsML enables news publishers in all market sectors to create a higher quality product by: (1) providing access to all the available media to tell a story; (2) clearly identify the details of a story leading to quicker production and editorial decisions; (3) allowing stories to be delivered to a range of different devices (mobile, desktop, PDA, etc.); (4) enabling greater description of data making it easier for publishers to provide updates as stories develop. NewsML will enhance the financial professional's news experience by creating more compelling stories: (1) Accuracy - improved search and information management capabilities increasing the relevance of stories received; (2) Personalized News - users can select the stories of most interest to them and have these delivered to their most preferred device (i.e., mobile phone, desktop PC, Palm Pilot, etc.); (3) Access to the bigger picture - stories will contain links to relevant background and related news... Reuters is an active advocate of using XML for news delivery. The concept was brought to life in 1999 when Reuters presented its initial proposals for NewsML to the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). This evolved into an IPTC generated Document Type Definition (DTD), which was released by the IPTC on October 11, 2000. The IPTC's approval of a NewsML version 1.0 specification reinforces Reuters global vision for using NewsML as the industry standard for the delivery of news."

[September 02, 2000] NewsML Demo/example. "I have posted a package at http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/Updatedemo.zip that contains an original NewsML instance, an Update Instance, a Catalogue file for resolving the file name of the original instance and an xsl stylesheet that can be used with xt or saxon to produce the update instance. All 4 features ('delete', 'replace', 'insert before', and 'insert after') are shown. The Revision number is also updated. Comments and feedback are welcome." From David Allen (International Press Telecommunications Council). [cache]

[July 27, 2000] "Reuters to Pioneer New Multimedia News Delivery. Global News Delivery Standard To Allow Text, Pictures and Video To Be Delivered Through A Single Multimedia Channel." - "Reuters, the global information and news group, announced today it plans to pioneer the packaging and distribution of multimedia news using a new computer language, NewsML, that it expects will become a news industry standard. NewsML, a derivative of the Internet's eXtensible Markup Language (XML), lets journalists and other publishers produce and assemble stories in video, text, graphics, pictures and audio, in any language and for platforms ranging from financial service desktops to Web sites to mobile phones. It provides a standard framework to describe, package, store and deliver multimedia news. Reuters was a leader in the creation of NewsML and has contributed to its development via the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), the news industry's standards body, which this month approved a beta release and anticipates a final version in October. Thomas Glocer, CEO of Reuters Information commented, 'NewsML is at the heart of Reuters strategy to deploy leading technologies to create and deliver multimedia news content. Reuters was very active in the development of NewsML with the IPTC. We look forward to its formal designation as an open standard in October and expect to be the first organization to deploy it in our global news operations.' Reuters plans to demonstrate NewsML on www.reuters.com in September [2000] and at a number of XML and news industry events during the coming months. The demonstrations will highlight NewsML's multimedia, multilingual news capability to deliver a single package to suit diverse client needs. The variety of user benefits will include the ability to choose text in several different languages, photos in various resolutions or sizes and the facility to bypass current Internet bandwidth limitations. NewsML is an XML-based standard that describes and packages multimedia news in various formats for delivery to any platform. At the heart of NewsML is the concept of the NewsItem, which can contain various media, including text, pictures, graphics and video. NewsML is flexible and extensible and uses standard Internet naming conventions for identifying the news objects in a NewsItem. Content does not have to be embedded in a NewsItem; pointers can be inserted to content held on a publisher's website. This means subscribers retrieve the data only when they need to and makes NewsML bandwidth-efficient."

[August 01, 2000] "XML standard for electronic news released." By Christine M. Campbell. In Network World (July 18, 2000). "The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) approved on Monday the public release of a standard based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) to simplify the delivery, creation and retrieval of news in electronic formats. Dubbed NewsML, the standard's 1.0 beta version was launched Monday and is the direct result of an IPTC initiative to deliver a standard to more easily manage electronically formatted news in environments such as wire services and Web sites, according to the IPTC. In addition, the standard allows for better categorization and indexing of the content, making retrieval easier. The content can be text, video, audio or still images. 'NewsML is about creating linked streams of objects so they can be managed through production' to the Web site rendering, said Tony Allday, product development director at Reuters Group. NewsML allows a developer to 'create one document that could be, because it's in XML, rendered using XML style sheets for the Web site and translated for use on some wireless devices,' he said. Using metadata tags to categorize news packages and their elements, NewsML allows for the physical description of the content, information about the construction of the content -- such as the author, publisher or owner -- and information about the content, such as what a particular story is about or who might be interested in it, according to the IPTC."

[July 27, 2000] "News Industry body announces the launch of NewsML v1.0 (beta)." - "The news industry's technical standards body has launched v1.0 (beta) of NewsML and has called for trial implementations. At its Annual General Meeting in Geneva, over 50 participating members of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), approved the public release of the first version of NewsML, an XML-based standard for the management of multimedia news. The news industry is now encouraged to start development implementations while final support documentation is prepared ahead of a planned ratification of the DTD at the IPTC's October meeting in Amsterdam. 'The launch of NewsML is a milestone achievement for the membership of the IPTC, the wider news community and the world of XML standards,' said Peter M|ller, Director of the Swiss News Agency and Chairman of the IPTC. 'It marks a major breakthrough in the area of standards for news management and interchange, and reflects the collaborative efforts of a large number of individuals from our membership. I am very proud to be able to announce this landmark news standard and would like to thank everyone involved for their invaluable contribution.' NewsML is the direct result of an IPTC initiative which started in October 1999, when the membership established a new work programme designated IPTC2000. The goal of IPTC2000 was to deliver an XML-based standard to represent and manage news through its life cycle, including production, interchange and consumer use. Basing their discussions on original working papers from both Reuters and Agence France Presse, and earlier research studies from dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur, the details of NewsML have been developed over the last nine months at a series of intense working group meetings held in Europe and America. Since April, the efforts of the membership have been supported by expert advice from Daniel Rivers-Moore of XML consultants, RivCom."

[April 20, 2000] "NewsML Functional Specification (Working Draft)." By Daniel Rivers-Moore, Director of New Technologies, RivCom. Consultant to the NewsML development process. NewsML-CSC-001. 9 April 2000. "This Working Draft is the first formal deliverable of the NewsML consultancy process, set in motion at the IPTC Spring Meeting in Nice, France, on 24 March 2000. It represents work in progress towards a full functional specification of NewsML. In its current form, its contents are not binding on IPTC or any of IPTCs members..." [from the .DOC version, NewsML list archive]

[April 20, 2000] "Reuters Launches New Web Delivery System for News." - "Reuters Group Plc said on Thursday it had launched a state-of-the-art delivery mechanism for news products, making it easier for Websites to publish its text, photos and video files. The Internet Delivery System (IDS) enables the news and information company to deliver content in Extensible Markup Language (XML), an advanced computer language developed from HTML, in which Internet pages are written. This system will be used as the principal delivery mechanism for Reuters growing range of Online Report services. Web publishers can display content using their own XML style sheets or use a template supplied by Reuters. 'We see IDS as a very exciting initiative and believe our customers will find its simplicity and flexibility invaluable. Being able to deliver our news content in XML will certainly ease the publishing process,' said Tony Allday, director, product development, Reuters Media..." See also the previous announcement, "Standards for News."

[April 05, 2000] "News Industry Advances XML Initiative." - "The news industry's technical standards body has approved two major working papers for its latest XML initiative, NewsML, and authorized retention of a consultant to produce a working draft by this summer. At its spring meeting here, the International Press Telecommunications Council also ratified improvements to the News Industry Text Format, the XML-based text markup standard, and expansions to its subject code list to provide for better coverage of the Summer Olympic Games. These actions are part of IPTC's continuing effort to give XML a greater role in the interchange of news information, said Anthony Allday, director of Development and Product Management, Media Group, at Reuterspace in London. Allday also is chairman of the organizations Press Relations Committee. The two NewsML papers are part of the IPTC 2000 initiative launched last fall to develop an XML-based framework for structuring and managing news objects in a multimedia environment. The consultant, Daniel Rivers-Moore of Rivcom, is expected to begin work in April on writing the NewsML DTD and related documentation. The goal is to have a draft ready for review for the IPTC Annual General Meeting in early July in Geneva. In other action at the spring meeting: (1) The NITF Maintenance Working Party won approval to streamline the text standard in two ways: (a) structural changes, to refine the organization of NITF documents, and improve definitions of container elements so their use is consistent; and (b) tag clarification, to eliminate redundant and unnecessary tags. The NITF Maintenance group was formed in January to manage changes to the standard and prepared these proposals at a meeting in February. Additional changes are pending and another meeting is expected before the July AGM. (The updated DTD is available at www.iptc.org or www.nitf.org ) (2) The Category Codes Working Party presented a proposal from Jean-Francois Richard of Agence France-Presse in Paris to add qualifiers such as age, sex and division to the IPTC Subject Code scheme. This is particularly important for identifying specific Olympic events, but has application in other sports reporting as well. The full Standards Committee approved the changes. Version 4 of the scheme in XML is available at www.nitf.org/SubjectView.zip (3) The IPTC agreed to pursue contacts with groups developing other media standards as it develops NewsML and maintains the NITF. These include MPEG-7, a metadata standard for audio and video objects; PRISM, an XML initiative for magazine publishing; and SMPTE/EBU, an advanced authoring format for the broadcasting industry."

[January 26, 2000] "NewsML Functions." By Jo Rabin. "The second draft of the NewsML functional description is now available." STA0002. 2nd IPTC Draft. 22nd January 2000. "NewsML is a media independent structural framework for news. This document defines the functionality of NewsML. Because the standards available to represent NewsML are rapidly changing it is likely that the encoding of NewsML will change over time to take advantage of those changing standards. The functionality of NewsML -- what it is able to represent and how it models the representational task in an abstract way - is also likely to change -- albeit relatively slowly. Hence this document is a bridge between the requirements of NewsML on the one hand (what it must be able to represent, and various non-optional features of how it is to do this) and the rules for how news is encoded for exchange (whether those rules are expressed by means of a DTD, a schema or whatever). NewsML's purpose is to be capable of representing news in all the various stages of its lifecycle in an electronic service environment - e.g., (1) for use in and between editorial systems; (2) between wire service providers and media clients; (3) between original publishers and aggregators/syndicators; (4) between news service providers and ultimate consumers of news. NewsML is intended for use in electronic news production, archiving and delivery and as such does not specifically set out to meet the needs of paper-based news publishing. It is intended that NewsML is able to include features required for paper-based publishing and other specific production environments by including external definitions designed for this purpose..."

[August 17, 2000] "I have updated the Controlled Vocabularies so they all have Duids. There is also some additional vocabularies and an XSLT stylesheet to view them in. The compressed package has also been updated. Changes are at http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/vocabularies. "Duid is a 'Document-unique Identifier'. It must satisfy the rules for XML ID [type] attributes: it must only contain name characters, and it must start with a name-start character (not a digit). Its value must be unique within any NewsML document. Every NewsML element type has Duid as an optional attribute. Combined with the Identifier element, providing a value for the Duid of any element in a NewsML document makes the element globally identifiable. The Identifier element gives global identification to the document, and the Duid provides local identification for the element within the document." Compare 'Euid'. "Euid is an 'Element-unique Identifier'. Its value must be unique among elements of the same element-type and having the same parent element. Use of Euid attribute makes it possible to identify any NewsML element within the context of its local branch of the NewsML document tree. This makes it possible to copy, or include by reference, subtrees into new combinations in ways that would break the uniqueness of Duids (thereby forcing new Duids to be allocated), but still being able to retain the identity of each element. If Euids are maintained at every level, it is possible to identify, for example 'The ContentItem whose Euid is abc within the NewsComponent whose Euid is def'. Such identification patterns would be preserved even after 'pruning and grafting' of subtrees..." [David Allen, 17 Aug 2000.]

[December 08, 1999] "Reuters to Use XML for News." - "Reuters, the global news and information group, is to introduce NewsML to present its news services. NewsML is an open standards-based format for the creation, transfer and delivery of news. It is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), the emerging Internet standard for data sharing between applications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, the co-ordinating body for Internet developments. Reuters has taken the initiative in the creation and adoption of NewsML through the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). The IPTC recently established a programme, IPTC 2000, which will deliver a single XML-based format for managing news production. An increasing number of Reuters subscribers are establishing themselves on the Internet and requesting delivery in XML. Jo Rabin, Reuters Vice President, Development, said: 'XML will make a substantial difference to the cost efficiency of our customers in many industry sectors. NewsML will offer new applications to a wider news market and make it easier to achieve the linkage of multi-media products ranging from text, photographs and video to wireless communications. Our adoption of NewsML is an example of Reuters policy to encourage the development of open standards, in line with its membership of the World Wide Web Consortium'. Reuters supplies the global financial markets and the news media with the widest range of information and news products including real-time financial data, collective investment data, numerical, textual, historical and graphical databases plus news, graphics, news video, and news pictures. It reaches over 519,000 users in 57,720 locations and extensively uses internet technologies for wider distribution of information and news. Reuters designs and installs enterprise-wide information management and risk management systems for the financial markets as well as providing equity and foreign exchange transaction systems. Reuters provides news and information to over 225 Internet sites reaching an estimated 12 million viewers monthly. Reuters is the world's largest news and television agency with 1,946 journalists, photographers and camera operators in 183 bureaux serving 157 countries. The International Press Telecommunications Council was established in 1965 to safeguard the telecommunications interest of the world's press. Since the late 1970s its activities have primarily focused on developing and publishing Industry Standards for the interchange of news data. At present, the IPTC membership is drawn mainly from the major news agencies around the globe but it also has a strong representation from newspaper publishers as well as system vendors."

[December 17, 1999] Experimental DTDs from Reuters. In connection with the NewsML and IPTC2000 mailing list, Nic Fulton (Leader of XML Architecture and Design, Reuters Ltd) posted a message about the availability of 'Experimental DTDs from Reuters.' Fulton writes: "... I have uploaded some experimental DTDs from Reuters. These were written by Jo Rabin and were submitted to the IPTC as a seed for some of the NewsML work. They can be found in the vault area on the eGroups web site at: http://www.egroups.com/docvault/newsml/. I hope this acts as a seed for further discussion, although please be aware that these are for 'information only'... Please note that these are NOT the current IPTC NewsML DTDs and [...] there is no certainty that the final NewsML DTD/DTDs will reflect some or any of the constructs within." A document accompanying the experimental DTDs "NewsML Elements and Attributes" 'outlines descriptions of the elements, attributes and reasoning.'

[December 17, 1999] Jo Rabin's document [draft/provisional/preliminary] "NewsML Elements and Attributes." XN-5. 12-November-1999, Revision 7. Accompanies 1999-11-10 DTD. "This document describes the elements and attributes of the NewsML DTD. The requirements of NewsML are described in XN-2 and the intended functionality in XN-3. XN-8 describes various encoding choices that underpin the formulation of the DTD." See the original RTF source document and the draft/provisional working DTDs in the ZIP archive.

Contact: jo.rabin@reuters.com [Jo Rabin, VP development Reuters and chair of the News Structure and Management Working Group]